Hello and welcome! Today is the first installment of a weekly, regular-ish Hearthstone column brought to you by yours truly and Numot Gaming where we talk about anything and everything from metagame, new decks, tournament results, card changes and releases, or anything else that particularly strikes my fancy. This week we will be talking about how to beat Jade Druid by using a class that is very near and dear to my hear with some of the more beloved little minions in Hearthstone: Murloc Paladin!
For those that might not be following the current metagame, this sums up the majority of the issues:
Druid’s fast mana has become a massive problem with the addition of Knights of the Frozen Throne and more specifically Ultimate Infestation. Before, choosing between drawing and ramping with Nourish was often a difficult choice and if the Druid player never saw a Nourish they would often get to the late game down a few cards due to spending them for ramp. Now, you can burn through a few cards early to ramp up your mana at lightning speed and get all of the cards you spent back stapled to a removal spell and a 5/5 minion that even comes with some bonus extra life thanks to Ultimate Infestation.
These cards have combined to make the Jade Golem strategy the #1 deck online: with its combination of mana ramping, card advantage, and resiliency plus inevitability it’s an extremely difficult deck to combat even if you’re able to get rid of their Jade Idols. There are very few decks that are able to claim a decent matchup against Jade Druid.
So what do we do? Do we just bow down and accept our nature-friendly overlords? Well…maybe. But if you’re like me and generally prefer beating the metagame rather than joining it, there are other options. In this case, it’s a deck that’s been around in some form for a bit and is a little bit…fishy:
Murloc Paladin has been a deck since Anyfin Can Happen released and let people one turn combo kill their opponent but has evolved to be the more midranged beatdown deck that is centered around Gentle Megasaur and efficient early threats. One of the weaknesses of Jade Druid (and other ramp style Druid decks) is that they spend early turns doing essentially nothing. Wild Growth makes the next turn better but at the cost of the current turn. Nourish gets you from turn 5 to turn 8, but at the cost of making your turn 5 more like a turn 2. Ultimate Infestation is an absurdly powerful card but it doesn’t do much to a board full of random murlocs that have been pumped by Gentle Megasaur. Knights of the Frozen Throne also brought a few sweet tools to the party, like Righteous Protector and Corpsetaker to keep your murlocs alive early and generally be annoying roadblocks and Bonemare which does a pretty good job imitating Dr Boom (one of the strongest cards ever).
Murloc strategies are generally aggressive midrange decks that have the ability to rapidly snowball out of control and the murloc Paladin deck is a great example of a combination of synergy and power fitting together to make a top tier deck. The few weaknesses it has are fairly specific: anything that can go faster while also going fairly wide (such as aggro Druid) or anything that can grind the deck out while being able to deal with multiple small threats in addition to single large threats (such as machinegun Priest) can give the deck problems. These weaknesses are a fairly small price to pay to combat the current Jade Druid plague and makes Murgledin a solid choice for laddering with until the Druid situation changes.
That’s it for this week. If you have a positive or a negative response please leave it in the comments area. Catch me next week! Or come watch me stream!
